This chapter considers the relationship between homelessness and the concepts of citizenship and social exclusion. The connections are complex and numerous while at the same time nebulous and changing. The meanings of the concepts themselves represent ‘contested terrain’. This chapter will argue, however, that this conceptual framework contributes to an understanding of the multiple connections between the ensembles of social rights, institutional and policy arrangements within and through which homelessness has been understood and through which the boundaries of citizenship and social exclusion have been drawn. The discussion will be located in the context of the contemporary ‘entrepreneurial’ city.

This chapter will begin with a brief discussion of the concepts of citizenship and social exclusion (for fuller discussions see Turner, 1993; Room, 1995; Bulmer and Rees, 1996; Jordan, 1996; Levitas, 1998; Lister, 1998). Developments in the post-war period will then be explored to establish the institutional, ideological and discursive context through which homelessness was constructed and the boundaries of citizenship and inclusionary and exclusionary criteria were established. The chapter will then consider the emergence of the new homelessness within an alternative policy discourse. Particularly from the early 1980s, this discourse was accompanied by the renegotiation of the content and meaning of citizenship rights. The chapter will argue that the current model of social integration and citizenship seems to be one in which there has been a re-evaluation of the notion of civil rights and an increasing emphasis on the ‘privatised’ citizen (Lister, 1990), active in the workfare state of the stakeholder society.

Citizenship and social exclusion

The concept of citizenship has a long history but is most commonly associated with the work of T.H. Marshall (1950) for whom citizenship is based upon rights and entitlements. His central theme was that the rights of citizenship involve national constitutional rights such as civil and political rights, as well as embracing social rights, each of which is closely associated with social and political institutions. The hallmark of advanced industrial democracies is the eventual institutionalisation of all three types of rights and, in particular, social citizenship. For Marshall, the citizenship rights that accrue to members of a political community integrate previously unintegrated segments of the population and serve to mitigate some of the inequalities of class, thus altering the pattern of social inequality.